Gartner Magic Quadrant: Team Collaboration and Social Software

There is a new magic quadrant out for Enterprise Team Collaboration and Social Software. This is the first MQ that focuses on this nascent space, so if Gartner has a quadrant they are getting a lot of inquiries from enterprise customers about these offerings.

Some thoughts:

1. They have grouped Wiki’s, Blogging tools, Collaboration products and Community Software all in one MQ. Its obvious that these tools do very different things. In fact I dont even see companies choosing between SocialText and Jive Software. Usually they need both.

2. There are quite a few other smaller vendors they have missed. Take a look at this more extensive list of vendors in the community space.

3. They have missed very good open source vendors such as WordPress and Drupal (which a lot of people use for communities)

I would expect Jeremiah and Mike to provide more color, but this is a start, not sure if I’d call it a good start. My friend Dan has a good introduction to the MQ itself.

Update: Read the report in detail. It does have Pros and Con’s listed by vendor. It also talks about vendors they did not include: Cisco, Novell, Oracle and Sun. Some insight on the inclusion / exclusion of certain vendors:

“Note that although we look for evidence of market presence (10 customers with 500 users each
in production) in order to exclude some of the very small vendors, we deliberately do not have an
explicit test for minimum revenue. This has meant that the Magic Quadrant includes products
from less-established vendors, from vendors experimenting with new pricing models, and opensource
products. This helps to reflect some of the innovation and alternative sourcing options
available in this market. However, although the size, revenues and profitability of the vendors was
taken into account when assessing their ability to execute, you should be aware that some of the
vendors here represent more risk than those in Magic Quadrants with a high revenue threshold.”

 (C) Gartner 2007. All Rights are theirs.